This week's forum on hate crimes, sponsored by the county branch of the NAACP, was aptly timed. We heartily wish we could say it wasn't so. You would think that in 2017 we'd have something more positive to talk about. Here we are more than 50 years after the civil rights revolution and more than 70 years after the liberation of Hitler's death camps, and yet the latest local and national stories include:

•A police investigation into whether hate was a motive in the stabbing death, on the campus of the University of Maryland, College Park, of a 23-year-old African-American who was about to graduate Bowie State University and become a second lieutenant in the Army. The 22-year-old from Severna Park arrested for the crime belonged to a Facebook group called Alt-Reich, which features sub-Neanderthal comments about women, Latinos, Jews and blacks.

•Hate crime charges filed against two men by the county state's attorney after a noose was found hanging from a light fixture at Crofton Middle School.

•Two men being stabbed to death and one injured on a light rail train in Portland, Oregon, after they stepped between a 35-year-old convicted felon screaming racist slurs and the two female teenagers, one wearing a Muslim head scarf, he was ranting at.

Yes, this is a big country and you can always find appalling cases if you scour the news hard enough. But if this isn't evidence we're moving backward, it surely isn't a sign of progress.

So it was a good time to gather people at a church in Odenton to hear the county's state's attorney talk about the prosecution of such cases, the county's police chief pledge to go after hate crimes "100 percent" and the head of the NAACP branch, the Rev. Stephen Tillett, read the FBI definition of a hate crime: a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity."

Proving motivation in court can be tricky. Elected officials can usually be counted on to make the right gestures, as with the Bowie City Council's statement of condolences for the slain student, or the anti-hate resolution Councilman Pete Smith plans to present to the County Council. But the people likely to commit such offenses probably aren't paying attention. Or, if they are, they may even be perversely encouraged. After all, there are lake-sized cesspools of hatred on the internet from which they can draw moral support.

That leaves the decent 99 percent of society with only a few tools. One is relentless prosecution of people who commit hate crimes. Another is refusal to be silent when someone parades their bigotry. Free speech is a sacred American right. But no one has the the right to expect that speech that spouts hatred won't be answered and denounced — or that criminal acts can be justified by the perpetrators' deep ignorance and bigotry.